anonymity and website access

Not sure if this is the best place to relate my discovery but seems to be the best of whats available.

Quite some time ago I used to occasionally visit picland.to when suddenly the site just started to fail to load regardless of browser (IE, NS, Opera) but I noticed there was some version of it via google translation pages.

Then the other day I thought I'd give the Tor network a try with the latest version of the XeroBank browser ( Torpark is another browser that operates over the Tor network)

www torproject org/index.html.en

xerobank com/download/xb-browser/

www brighthub com/computing/smb-security/reviews/33027.aspx


To my surprise I can access picland with XeroBank so I assume some time ago someone somewhere enforced some sort of filtering that prevented access to that website. I'm not sure why that site was filtered but countless others were not.

XeroBank and the Tor network are noticeably slower than my usual browser (Opera) and XeroBank is a bit 'clunky': for example I'm posting this from xB (XeroBank) but I had trouble getting the thread tool options to show. Also XeroBank do try to sell their service with their browser although its not at all a hard sell but I might try the Torpark browser when I get a chance and see how that performs.

Tried the tor version of firefox, rather than the xB version which I initially used above, and I think I prefer the tor version. The tor version (available via the first link above) comes with something called vidalia control panel which looks useful (but I'm yet to play with), seems a bit faster (but still slower than non-anonymous browsing which I suspect will always be the case due to onion routing), and seems to render webpages better. And the tor version installation can be self-extracted into any directory (including USB drives) and work, so it doesn't tie itself into Windows as much - always a good thing as far as I'm concerned.