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The only thing you know about someone who is using Tor is that, well, they don’t want to be known.
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A Tor exit node will appear to the Internet as if it were the actual user on the other side of Tor. Tor exit nodes, on the other hand, are anything but simple and safe. They have no exposure to volatile Tor traffic passing through them because it’s encrypted. Tor relay nodes are simple and safe-they’re just bridges from one node to the next in the network.
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The Tor network is composed of two types of nodes: relay nodes and exit nodes. But because the Tor network is actually pretty good at anonymization, the NSA still couldn’t de-anonymize users, at least according to the Snowden papers. National Security Agency (NSA) ran up to 50 percent of the Tor nodes in the aftermath of the Heartbleed incident. 1 These volunteers are constantly trying to improve the network, releasing Tor Browser updates and closing the periodic de-anonymization vulnerabilities that pop up. Today, the Tor network is mostly run by true (privacy) believers at the Tor Project. Yet, Tor annoys law enforcement (e.g., the FBI), which can’t track hackers, thieves, and drug dealers who use it. DARPA-the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-invented the Tor network, and still partially funds it, as a way for overseas spies to get data home without blowing their cover via IP address trails.
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