The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

One wayy to mask yyour IP address is to use the onion router (Tor), which
is what Snowden and Poitras did.
Developed byy the US Naval Research Laboratoryy in 2004 as a wayy for
militaryy personnel to conduct searches without exposing their phyysical
locations, the Tor open-source program has since been expanded. Tor is
designed to be used byy people living in harsh regimes as a wayy to avoid
censorship of popular media and services and to prevent anyyone from
tracking what search terms theyy use. Tor remains free and can be used byy
anyyone, anyywhere—even yyou.
How does Tor work? It upends the usual model for accessing a website.
Usuallyy when yyou go online yyou open an Internet browser and tyype in
the name of the site yyou want to visit. A request goes out to that site, and
milliseconds later a response comes back to yyour browser with the website
page. The website knows—based on the IP address—who the service
provider is, and sometimes even where in the world yyou are located, based
on where the service provider is located or the latencyy of the hops from
yyour device to the site. For example, if yyour device sayys it is in the United
States, but the time and number of hops yyour request takes to reach its
destination suggest yyou are somewhere else in the world, some sites—
gaming sites, in particular—will detect that as possible fraud.
When yyou use Tor, the direct line between yyou and yyour target website is
obscured byy additional nodes, and everyy ten seconds the chain of nodes
connecting yyou to whatever site yyou are looking at changes without
disruption to yyou. The various nodes that connect yyou to a site are like
layyers within an onion. In other words, if someone were to backtrack from
the destination website and tryy to find yyou, theyy’d be unable to because the
path would be constantlyy changing. Unless yyour entryy point and yyour exit
point become associated somehow, yyour connection is considered
anonyymous.
When yyou use Tor, yyour request to open a page—sayy,
mitnicksecurityy.com—is not sent directlyy to that server but first to another
Tor node. And just to make things even more complicated, that node then
passes the request to another node, which finallyy connects to
mitnicksecurityy.com. So there’s an entryy node, a node in the middle, and an
exit node. If I were to look at who was visiting myy companyy site, I would
onlyy see the IP address and information from the exit node, the last in the