so you have finally installed tor.
whether you're using linux or windows or an ios or android device, tor has several things to consider when 1st launching it.
so let's go ahead and launch tor and we'll see some of the settings that we can configure right off the bat.
one of the 1st things we see when launching tor is if we want to connect to tor.
we could simply click this purple button here and connect, or we can configure the connection.
we can also set it to always connect automatically, which you might want to do.
generally, this will be the option you use.
most people will only use this, but the configure connection gives you some deeper information about what to connect with.
so we can see here we're connected to the internet.
we can test that, or we can see if we're connected to the tor network.
of course, we're not connected yet.
this is where we can actually configure bridges, which we've not discussed bridges just yet.
but it tells you right here what bridges are, right?
they help you securely access the tor network in places where tor is blocked.
so this is important for people who might have issues connecting to tor.
beyond that, this is also a good way to potentially hide the fact that you're using tor to your isp or your vpn provider.
this will hide that fact because bridges are essentially tor nodes that aren't publicly shown on the tor node list.
and we'll talk more about bridges, their purpose, how to configure them a little bit later.
but you could just request a bridge if you had the information, or you can just select a built- in bridge.
and we'll talk about these different types and how they work a little bit later.
there's some more advanced settings here we can get into if you're using a proxy or if you have a specific firewall where you need to connect through only specific ports outbound, and then you can view some logs around, tour the connection and all of that sort of stuff.
but as we talked about earlier, we'll just go ahead and connect normally.
and once it's connected, it will load this page.
this is like the default browsing page for tor and you can search with duckduckgo.
and if you want to test that it's working correctly, i suggest maybe trying something like onionlinkhub dot com.
that's our website for onion link sharing where you can actually connect and see different onion links.
and right now, this is obviously not the darknet website, the dark web service, right?
you want to click on this.
so if you click on that, it will open a new tab and this will actually connect you to our onion service.
and now you can see that we are on a dot onion and you are there and we can now just explore some links through here.
this is where we could get involved and start accessing stuff.
so obviously this link is fake.
some of the links say offline.
we're still, this is still in beta.
so some of the things aren't working correctly, but by the time you're watching this video, some of these should be ironed out, but you can actually see some other stuff.
so through here, we can go to the cia's website if we really wanted to and just notice the load times on everything.
that's pretty standard with tor, but you can see we are on the cia's.
onion site.
there's a few major buttons to be aware of when accessing tor 1st.
there's this one.
this shows your actual circuit path.
so as we talked about earlier, right, the three node minimum, that's our 1st node is in germany.
our 2nd is in the us and our 3rd one's in germany.
you can see where the speed issues come into play because we're jumping across the world multiple times, right?
we're going to germany, which this pc is based in the us.
so i'm going from the us to germany back to the us to germany again, and then to the cia website, which i'm guessing is hosted in the united states.
so that hopping back and forth is what really causes that delay.
but let's say we wanted to create a new circuit.
we just want to change our identity.
you can just select new tor circuit.
and the entry node didn't change in this example, but the 2nd and 3rd node did.
and we can do this again and again.
and this essentially just rotates your connection, which helps that anonymity and security.
there's some information.
this is normal site information around the certificate and your connection.
and then there is reset your identity, which essentially wipes everything, closes all your sessions and then restarts the tor browser.
we're not going to do that quite yet.
and then we have our security level and we'll talk a little bit more about this in the next video, but we can read through what these mean and all of that a little bit later, but that's it for now.
if you have any questions, let me know.
otherwise, we'll see you in the next one.