Bison have seen some bad days. Once, there were 20,000,000. Then, there were 541. But things got better and today there are 500,000.

The key, they say, is to be able to ride out the bad times. But how do you do that? I asked some bison for advice.

Torbrowser is designed for privacy, while making it easy for people to use the Tor service.

If you ever find yourself pondering the possibility that the legality of certain activities may change in the future …
If you need to research possible actions you may take but do not want to create a trail by which you may be tracked …
If you find the need to discuss events and concerns with anonymity but think that your ISP may not have your best interests at heart …
If you find yourself, for some reason, needing to access the Internet from an unsecured location but don’t want others to know where you are …

Use Torbrowser. It will work on Windows, OSX, and Linux and it doesn’t need to be installed. If you have the ability to launch a program, you can use Torbrowser.

Once it runs, browsing may be slow (bison love to browse slow), but you have much more privacy through the Torbrowser.

When using Torbrowser, be careful not to accidentally over-share.

• Do use HTTPS on all sites. This should happen automatically, but check anyway.
• Do not use Google for search. Duck Duck Go is a better choice.
• Don’t fill in any forms (including login forms) using real information. April 1st is generally a good birth date.
• Don’t use torrents over Tor. They leak your information.
• Don’t open any documents. Downloading a Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or PDF file through Torbrowser does not make it safe.

You can get Torbrowser here: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

If that link is blocked, you can also get it via Twitter (@get_tor) or email ([email protected])

I expect that bison will have more advice in the coming weeks.