Planned Firefox ‘Super Private’ Mode May Get Around UK Porn Block

CYBERSPACE—Starting on July 15, porn fans in the United Kingdom will find their favorite sites blocked, as a new law takes effect after two years of delays, requiring anyone accessing online porn to first upload official documents with proof of age, as AVN.com has reported. But the makers of the popular web browser Firefox appear to be planning a new privacy feature that could neutralize the porn blockages. According to a report by PC Gamer magazine, Firefox maker Mozilla is working on a way to integrate Firefox with the Tor network, a worldwide system for anonymous internet browsing, to create a “super private mode.” Firefox currently comes with a “private browsing” mode, but like private modes in other browsers, the Firefox privacy setting does not protect a user’s identity online. All private browsing modes do is automatically delete browser histories, cookies and other digital clues on the computer using the private mode, so that any other person using the same computer will not be able to see what sites have been visited. But by connecting to Tor, “super private” browsing would completely shield a user’s identity not only from other users of the same computer, but from anyone and any other computer online. In fact, as TechSpot points out, Tor also hides the IP address—including the physical location of a user’s computer—from any prying eyes or digital monitoring systems online. Without being able to figure out where a user is located, the UK porn blocking system would not be able to work, and users could visit any sites they desire, with no restrictions. The same would hold true as a way to evade the porn ban in India, or other countries. Of course, users can accomplish the same thing right away, without waiting for Firefix, by downloading the Tor browser itself. The Tor project dates back to the 1990s, according to Tor’s own site, when the U.S. Naval Research Lab began looking for ways to use the internet without being subject to the mass surveillance and data collection that was already emerging as a serious problem online as early as 1995. Tor, or The Onion Routing, works by redirecting internet traffic through numerous servers, and encrypting the data at each location, making a trace of the traffic’s origin nearly impossible. Photo By The Mozilla Foundation