The US government built a tool that makes you invisible on the internet. Then they gave it away for free.
Tor is legal. Most people think it is not.
The US Naval Research Laboratory invented it in the 1990s. Three scientists named David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson. The Office of Naval Research and DARPA paid for it. The State Department still pays for it today.
The same government that runs the NSA also funds the tool that stops the NSA from watching you.
How it works: your traffic bounces through three random volunteer servers. No single server knows both who you are and what you are looking at. Your internet provider sees only that you connected to Tor.
What Tor does NOT do: it does not make you a hacker. It does not drop you on the dark web. You browse normal websites with more privacy. It does not break any law in the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, India, or most countries.
Who uses it:
The New York Times runs a Tor address for sources to send tips. The BBC runs a Tor mirror so people in censored countries can read the news. Facebook has run a Tor address since 2014. Edward Snowden used Tor in 2013. A 2012 NSA internal slide deck, made public through the Snowden files and reported by The Guardian and Washington Post, called Tor the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity.
In 2023 and 2024 the US government paid the Tor Project $2,556,472. The biggest grant funded uncensored internet access in China, Hong Kong, and Tibet.
The Naval Research Laboratory's own page says two million people use Tor every day.
BSD-3-Clause license. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. Roger Dingledine still runs the project.
This is what the internet was supposed to look like from the start.
(Link in the comments)
Freud was wrong about most things, and he was wrong about this.
The "years of struggle" are never the "most beautiful."
Struggle sucks, it is hard & often painful.
Romanticizing struggle is something people who haven't really struggled do.
You must play dumb. Ask dumb questions, request clarifications. Never show your intelligence outright. Force the others to overexplain and gather intel. And watch as they reveal far more than they should. Few understand that in the wrong environments, high intelligence is naturally perceived as a threat.
I'll admit, I enjoy playing with AI.
It's fun to argue with. Do writing exercises with. Study books with. Turn my ideas into visuals. Go down late-night curiosity spirals.
Shortcuts are one option.
They're not the only one.
Being with someone who is your intellectual match, will become more important than you think.
Be able to have great conversations.
Having a pretty or handsome idiot may seem fun, but as the years pass their early looks shift, and then you're just left with....an idiot.
You get rich by betting on things other people are wrong about. Because most "good" investments have their "goodness" priced into them, making them "mediocre" or "bad" investments in reality.
The key is to find something that looks bad but is actually good. Which means you gotta be willing to have people tell you why you're dumb (then wait). Then get called lucky. Then do it a few more times. Then have people say you're finally good.
But by the time they say you're good it already stopped mattering to you what they thought because why would you respect someone's judgment who was so repeatedly bad? They now only say you're good because everyone else does and not because they could ever make up their minds on their own.