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The Daily Dot has a story about a browser vendor who wants to package Tor as part of its private browsing mode. From the article:
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
The author elaborates:
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
The story appears to have gleaned most of its information from a tor-dev mailing list post. An interesting reply from Tor developer Mike Perry explains how Tor can be modified so that the network can handle the extra load.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Tuesday September 30 2014, @01:58PM
Tor's anonymization works best when there are a lot of users making a lot of queries at the same time, preferably visiting the same sites - it's much harder to sort through the noise and pinpoint individual users. Also, it makes it harder for an attacker with access to a few nodes to gather sufficient data to de-anonymize individuals. As long as the network can handle the load (which needs to be proven), this seems like a Good Thing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Random2 on Tuesday September 30 2014, @03:19PM
As I understand Tor, all traffic on the network is randomly routed through all nodes attached to it (not necessarily that a packet hits every possible node, rather than any given node may route packets). Will that be the case if I have a browser integrated with Tor? Will I be seeing a significant increase in network activity on my connection? I already have a terrible enough connection as is (and no alternatives, gotta love the monopoly), and if it meant taking my 0.6 meg/s connection and slowing it even further, well...
If only I registered 3 users earlier....