The Internet has become a fountain of information that most people use on a daily basis for entertainment and education…work and play. Unfortunately, the convenience of the World Wide Web also comes with hidden dangers. Online crimes are on the rise and are constantly evolving technologically. Anonymizers protect your privacy and secures your identity by staying one step ahead of these online predators.

One such program is Tor, an implementation of second-generation onion routing â€' a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004. The EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005, and continues to provide web hosting for the project.

Tor aims to protect its users against traffic analysis attacks. Tor operates an overlay network of onion routers that enables two things: anonymous outgoing connections and anonymous hidden services.

Users of the Tor network run an onion proxy on their machine. This software connects out to Tor, periodically negotiating a virtual circuit through the Tor network. Tor employs cryptography in a layered manner (hence the onion analogy), ensuring perfect forward secrecy between routers. At the same time, the onion proxy software presents a SOCKS interface to its clients. SOCKS-aware applications may be pointed at Tor, which then multiplexes the traffic through a Tor virtual circuit.

Once inside the Tor network, the traffic is sent from router to router, ultimately reaching an exit node at which point the cleartext packet is available and is forwarded on to its original destination. Viewed from the destination, the traffic appears to originate at the Tor exit node.

Tor's application independence sets it apart from most other anonymity networks: it works at the TCP stream level. Applications commonly anonymised using Tor include IRC, instant messaging and browsing the Web. When browsing the Web, Tor is often coupled with Privoxy â€' a filtering proxy server â€' that aims to add privacy at the application layer.
Although Tor's most popular feature is its provision of anonymity to clients, it can also provide anonymity to servers. By using the Tor network, it is possible to host servers in such a way that their network location is unknown. In order to access a hidden service, Tor must also be used by the client.

Hidden services are accessed through the Tor-specific .onion top level domain. The Tor network understands this TLD and routes, anonymously to the hidden service. The hidden service then hands over to standard server software, which should be configured to listen only on non-public interfaces. Services that are reachable through Tor hidden services and the public Internet are susceptible to correlation attacks, and consequently are not really hidden.

An added advantage of Tor hidden services is that, because no public IP address is required, services may be hosted behind firewalls and NAT.

Here is a list of other good anonymizers on the net

Anonymouse - a very good free anonymizer. By using this CGI proxy you can anonymously surf web pages, send anonymous e-mails and look at news.

ShadowBrowser - anonymously surf the internet and protect your Internet history at the same time. No software to download and supports SSL websites.

www.ProxyKing.net - This anonymizer service keeps websites from tracking your internet movements by preventing them from placing cookies on your home computer.

AnonymousIndex.com - Anonymous private surfing service, hide your ip, manage website ads, referrers and cookies through this free web based proxy.

www.HideMyAss.com - Free anonymous browsing, for the times when you REALLY need to hide your ass online!

You can find others and much more here.