One very important thing that TOR provides is additional routes when international routing between ISPs is blocked/broken for whatever reason.
Several websites (that are legal, legitimate in nature) get censored by tier-1 ISPs (for whatever reason) however even though they are clearnet websites, you can still view them out of country, since with TOR you can keep refreshing your routes until you get access.
Good example: I needed to get voter information abroad in order to get a mail-in ballot, but the government website blocked all foreign origin connections.
Personally I think it should be illegal for government websites to even present you with a captcha, especially one from a hostile corporation like Google. But this is a battle I've long since quit fighting...
I recently wanted to check the price of tickets on Ticketmaster. Got an error about me looking like a bot (this was clearnet from a foreign country). Same deal with Tor.
This is why we cannot have nice things. Ticketmaster wants to keep all the scalping on their platform and not anyone else's.
> Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.
While I know that’s the correct answer from the tor project, I still dislike it. It was/IS an acronym. Capitalization I’ve seen used across people familiar and unfamiliar with the tech.
I remember it back in the day as fully capitalized.
Now that the TorProject has opted to correct the record, it is too little too late. Most presentations at the time did use "TOR" and it was called the TOR router. Even they understand the acronym comes from the original onion routing project from the Naval Research Lab.
All that to say, I don't know why they would try to distance themselves from what it was, and what it still is.
Maybe they changed it because it seemed redundant to say "TOR router" (like ATM machine)... :)
Either way I don't mind, but personally I think "Tor" looks more professional, less shouty, and doesn't conflict with "top of rack" router/switch (which is a thing in datacenters). I have noticed that the Tor project is pretty protective of their brand, e.g. if you start a project including "Tor" in its name they will complain and ask you to clarify lack of affiliation.
Several websites (that are legal, legitimate in nature) get censored by tier-1 ISPs (for whatever reason) however even though they are clearnet websites, you can still view them out of country, since with TOR you can keep refreshing your routes until you get access.