the.com/tor
The internet's trench coat: free, anonymous, and slightly suspicious to everyone watching.
means A high craggy hill or rocky outcrop — and, separately, the acronym for a network that bounces your traffic through encrypted relays so no one can trace where it came from.
from The landscape word 'tor' is old, likely from Old English 'torr' (rock, peak), possibly tangled up with a Celtic root behind words like the Welsh 'twr' (tower, heap) — it's what gave Dartmoor its tors. The software 'Tor' is unrelated in root but cheeky in naming: it started life as 'The Onion Router,' layering encryption like an onion's skins, and the creators simply kept the acronym after the full name got shortened.
- full name
- The Onion Router, layers not tears
- origin
- built by the US Navy, ironically
- how it works
- bounces traffic through three random relays
- dark side
- gateway to both journalists and black markets