Vidalia (formerly known as Tor) is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people who want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Vidalia can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Vidalia also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy.
Vidalia aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.
Vidalia's security is improved as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run servers. Please consider volunteering your time or volunteering your bandwidth. And remember that this is development code - it's not a good idea to rely on the current Vidalia network if you really need strong anonymity.
By default, Tor is configured to run at startup. If you do not want Vidalia to run on startup, you can disable this by selecting "Customize" in the Installer, and then un-checking the "Tor Startup Script" box. Be sure to leave the other boxes checked. Once the installer is finished and your computer restarts, Tor will start automatically. Tor comes configured as a client by default. It uses a built-in default configuration file in /Library/Tor/torrc, but most people won't need to change any of the settings.
Privoxy is installed as part of the Tor bundle package installer. Privoxy is a filtering web proxy that integrates well with Tor. Once it's installed, it will start automatically when your computer is restarted. You do not need to configure Privoxy to use Tor. A custom Privoxy configuration for Tor has been installed as part of the installer package.
