Developing good habits: using Tor well over time
Installing Tor is the easy part. The habits that actually keep you private are the ones nobody puts in the setup guide.
Author: Jesus Cordonero
Jesus Cordonero has been using Tor since 2013 - long enough to have watched onion addresses change format, seen the old link directories decay into phishing traps, and seen the same few mistakes catch people over and over. Not a cryptographer, and this site does not pretend otherwise. What it offers is twelve years of paying attention: what actually breaks, what the guides leave out, and which advice has aged badly. Technical claims follow the Tor Project's own documentation. Anything that turns out to be wrong gets corrected, and the correction is dated. Corrections are welcome and get credited.
What using Tor was like in 2013, and what actually improved
Twelve years of changes: what got genuinely better, what quietly got worse, and which problems are exactly where they were.
The scams that keep coming back
The same handful of frauds have been catching people on Tor for over a decade. They recur because they work. Here is what each one looks like.
The Hidden Wiki, then and now
It began as a community index of onion sites. Today almost every copy carrying the name is a phishing operation. How it decayed, and why it matters.
What changed when v2 onion addresses stopped working
If you have a bookmark ending in sixteen characters and .onion, it died in October 2021. What happened, why, and why it made phishing so much worse.
Is Bitcoin anonymous?
No. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, and its ledger is public and permanent. Here is what that difference means, and how names get attached to addresses.
What an onion service is, and how it differs from a website
Onion services are sites that live inside the Tor network and never touch the ordinary internet. Here is how they work and why their addresses look like that.
Installing Tor Browser, step by step
How to download and install Tor Browser safely, where the fake copies hide, and the two settings to get right before you start browsing.
What Tor hides, and what it doesn’t
Tor hides which sites you visit from your provider, and your location from those sites. It does not hide who you log in as. The full picture, plainly.
What is Tor? A plain-language introduction
Tor is a free network that hides which sites you visit and where you are. Here is how it works, what it protects you from, and what it does not.