'tor' is an implementation of The Onion Routing system, as described in a bit more detail at http://www.onion-router.net/. You can read list archives, and subscribe to the mailing list, at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/. Is your question in the FAQ? Should it be? ************************************************************************** See the INSTALL file for a quickstart. That is all you will probably need. ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** You only need to look beyond this point if the quickstart in the INSTALL doesn't work for you. ************************************************************************** Do you want to run a tor server? See http://tor.eff.org/doc/tor-doc.html#server Do you want to run a hidden service? See http://tor.eff.org/doc/tor-doc.html#hidden-service Configuring tsocks: If you want to use Tor for protocols that can't use Privoxy, or with applications that are not socksified, then download tsocks (tsocks.sourceforge.net) and configure it to talk to localhost:9050 as a socks4 server. My /etc/tsocks.conf simply has: server_port = 9050 server = 127.0.0.1 (I had to "cd /usr/lib; ln -s /lib/libtsocks.so" to get the tsocks library working after install, since my libpath didn't include /lib.) Then you can do "tsocks ssh arma@moria.mit.edu". But note that if ssh is suid root, you either need to do this as root, or cp a local version of ssh that isn't suid. (On Windows, you may want to look at the Hummingbird SOCKS client, or at SocksCap, instead.)