How anonymous is Tor?

Lets go to the extreme and say a user looks at some truly dodgy shit on Tor.
Maybe looking at sites that sell weapons, drugs, child porn or some other crazy shit like that.

Can they expect the authorities to be kicking down their door in the coming days?

Can they expect the authorities to be kicking down their door in the coming days?

"danblukk"

Depends on their paranoia.

Silkroad is up and running for already 3 years, they make several million dollars monthly by selling illegal drugs, and authorities still can't find them. So 100% protection with Tor is at least possible. Proven by this and many other examples.

But also there are some other examples, like massive de-anon with Firefox 17 exploit, which was done by NSA a couple month ago. So Tor cannot give you comfortable sense of security, you should still be on the alert, study known threats & ways to defeat them. Keep your software up-to-date, turn off insecure plugins, avoid careless behavior like sharing personal data etc.

Yea I can totally understand the risks with hosting dodgy sites.
Just meant your average joe user thats looking at or buying dodgy stuff.
Just obviously you get the scare mongerers that say the Feds will be round your house for even clicking on a site in Tor.

Just meant your average joe user thats looking at or buying dodgy stuff.

"danblukk"

Only if you're buying stuff on a website that was compromised.

Using Virtual Environment Setup (such as http://whonix.org) instead of Tor Browser Button is a bit more complicated, but secures you even in this worst case.

So no worries, Tor is safe enough.

Does Tor encrypt everything that comes out from my PC, even the DNS requests to resolve the domain "illegalsite.com"?

I hope the destination IP of the site illegal.com are only visible inside the IP packets coming out from the
Tor's exit relay, not in the packets coming out from my PC and entering Tor, is it so?

Does Tor encrypt everything that comes out from my PC, even the DNS requests to resolve the domain "illegalsite.com"?

I hope the destination IP of the site illegal.com are only visible inside the IP packets coming out from the
Tor's exit relay, not in the packets coming out from my PC and entering Tor, is it so?

"joeforte23"

Yes and no. Tor is capable to forward DNS requests, but not all programs use this feature. For example, Firefox by default tries to resolve "illegalsite.com" locally, and not via Tor. To change this behavior you should open about:config, find there network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and set it to true. Fortunately, version of Firefox that comes with Tor Browser Bundle has this flag already set. But if you download & install fresh copy of Firefox it will not forward DNS request to Tor and will therefore reveal "illegalsite" to your ISP.

You may consider to block all traffic exept tor, or even route all traffic to tor.