Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.

What's New:

This is a major release and the first one in the 6.5 series. First of all it fixes the usual critical bugs in Firefox by updating to ESR 45.7.0. It contains version updates to other bundle components as well: Tor to 0.2.9.9, OpenSSL to 1.0.2j, HTTPS-Everywhere to 5.2.9, and NoScript to 2.9.5.3.

Besides those updates Tor Browser 6.5 ships with a lot of the improvements we have been working on in the past couple of months.

On the security side we alwaysblock remote JAR filesnow andremove the support for SHA-1 HPKP pins. Additionally we backported from an other firefox branch patches to mark JIT pages as non-writable and other crash fixes that could disrupt a Tor Browser session quite reliably.

With respect to user tracking and fingerprinting we now isolate SharedWorker script requests to the first party domain. We improved our timer resolution spoofing and reduced the timing precision for AudioContext, HTMLMediaElement, and Mediastream elements. We stopped user fingerprinting via internal resource:// URLs, and for Windows users we fixed a regression introduced in Tor Browser 6.0 which could leak the local timezone if JavaScript were enabled.

A great deal of our time was spent on improving the usability of Tor Browser. We redesigned the security slider and improved its labels. We moved a lot of Torbutton's privacy settings directly into the respective Firefox menu making it cleaner and more straightforward to use. Finally, we moved as many Torbutton features as possible into Firefox to make it easier for upstreaming them. This allowed us to resolve a couple of window resizing bugs that piled on over the course of the past years.

The features mentioned above are only some of the highlights in Tor Browser 6.5. The full changelog since 6.0.8 is:

All Platforms

Read the rest here:

Tor Browser 6.5 Download - TechSpot