I have a new Android smartphone, and I was recently looking into options for anonymous browsing on it. The Tor Project offers an app called Orbot that enables using the Tor network, but at the moment it only works on Android 1.x because the 2.x OS doesn’t have a way yet for you to set the proxy. While digging around into some phone hacks, however, I discovered that you can use the Voice Dialer app to run certain commands. By saying “proxy,” for example, you get a proxy configuration screen. Interesting enough, this enables you to set a proxy and run Orbot to use Tor on your phone.
Here’s how to do it:
- Install the Orbot app
- Pull up the Voice Dialer app, and speak the word “proxy”
- In the proxy configuration screen, put 127.0.0.1 and port 8118
- Fire up the Orbot app
- Your browsing session will now be anonymized via Tor (test it here)
- When you’re done, pull up the Voice Dialer again and reset the proxy to return to regular browsing
This works for unrooted phones. This only seems to work via the cell’s 3G connection, not over wifi. It also only anonymizes your browser traffic. For more info, read up on Tor.
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
