Good Day my Linux Yogi’s,
if you are looking for a way to browse the web securely or you are interested about the Darknet then this article can get you started with this. So how do we get started? The easiest and simplest way is to get TOR installed.
So what is TOR? TOR is a modified Mozilla Firefox web browser optimized for security and privacy. The TOR Browser Package we are going to install will make it very easy to connect your computer with the Darknet as well as enabling you to browse more secure and privately the internet. You will miss most likely the comfort of all the nice goodies a normal browser like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox has build in but the pay off is less security and privacy. So let’s get started and install TOR on Ubuntu Desktop.
Let’s go to the TOR Project website to the Debian/Ubuntu guide. Go to:
After you entered the URL you should see the following on your screen.
Scroll a little bit further down and in the drop down list pick your Ubuntu version. I am going to select Ubuntu Xenial Xerus and keep the rest as defaulted.
Below the section where we made our selection there are instructions for how to add it to your system. There are two methods for adding the repositories.
The first method is to add the following two lines to the end of your already existing /etc/apt/sources.list file. User your preferred editor for example nano and execute the following command:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
add this two lines to the end of it.
deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main
and save the file. The second and my preferred method is to create a new file under the following directory: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and add them in this file.
sudo touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor-project.list
this created the file now lets add those two lines to it.
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor-project.list
add these lines:
deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main
and save the file. So before we actually can use the new repositories we have to download and install the proper gpg key. You can do that by running the following two commands:
sudo gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 sudo gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -
after executing those commands you should see something like this:
Now we are good to go. Let’s update our repository database and install the tor browser with the following two commands:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tor torbrowser-launcher deb.torproject.org-keyring
You will be presented with a summary and a question if you want to continue.
Type “y” to continue. This will install the TOR Browser and we can go ahead for it’s first start. Now click on your Application Menu in the top left corner and search for tor. You should see something like this:
Click on Tor Browser and you should see the following:
This process may take a moment so be patient. When it’s done you should see this:
In most cases you are good to go and can simply click on the “Connect” button but in cases where you need to use a proxy server you need to click on the “Configure” button and add your proxy server configuration. Click on “Connect” and see what happens.
It is connecting you to the Tor Network and when it is done the Tor Browser will start automatically.
So there are a few things you should know and look out for.
On the top left in the browser window you see a Icon of an Onion. If this icon is green you are good. If it is displaying anything else you need to click on it to figure out whats going on and most time a simple update will fix it.
Another thing I should mention is to never use the browser in full screen mode which can enable websites to track you. If you do that you will see the following warning.
On the welcome page of the Tor Browser there is a link “Test Tor Network Settings” you can click this link to verify that you indeed are connected to the Tor network. You should see something like this:
That is it my friends. Now you can start to discover the Darknet or simply surf a bit safer through the Internet.
I hope I could be of help with this article. Please consider registering to this blog and share it as well.
Thank you my friends, until next time Namaste ! 😉