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When you get notified about a new update and choose to download it or click Help=>About manually, does Tor use use Tor to download the new update or does it download it not anonymously?

To clarify, is it downloaded via a Tor circuit or just directly via your real IP address?

user1741948
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1 Answers1

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You can read all about it in the Tor article Making Tor Browser Updates Stable and Reliable with Fastly.

Tor updates are housed and distributed by Fastly, which describes itself as a cloud edge platform, and not by the Tor project.

This is because the Tor project doesn't have the required infrastructure to support these millions of downloads. In 2017, when the article was written, these downloads represented 2.1TB/day.

The download method is not detailed in the article, but seeing this enormous amount of data, it would take forever to pass it through the Tor network and would overburden it unnecessarily. In addition, the documentation by Fastly doesn't mention any Tor addresses.

The answer is highly likely that the Tor browser does a direct download, using likely the exact same mechanism as Firefox on which it was built.

harrymc
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  • "Does Tor use Tor" meant do they download it anonymously using the Tor anonymization or with a plain connection through your direct IP? – user1741948 Oct 25 '22 at 18:36
  • This is not detailed in the article, but seeing this enormous amount of data, it would take forever to pass it through the Tor network and would overburden it unnecessarily. In addition, the documentation by Fastly doesn't mention any Tor addresses. The answer is highly likely a direct download. – harrymc Oct 25 '22 at 18:43
  • Can you add your latest comment to your answer? – user1741948 Oct 25 '22 at 18:44
  • Done as requested. – harrymc Oct 25 '22 at 18:48