NSA and GCHQ agents 'leak Tor bugs'

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

"It's sort of funny because it also came out that GCHQ heavily relies on Tor working to be able to do a lot of their operations.
"So you can imagine one part of GCHQ is trying to break Tor, the other part is trying to make sure it's not broken because they're relying on it to do their work.
"So it's typical within governments, or even within large agencies, that you have two halves of the same coin going after different parts of Tor. Some protect it, some to try to attack it."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28886462

Never heard of tor before. I wonder if it is capable of online shopping, like amazon, or if all that is totally disabled.

[LongBlade]

I've heard of Tor. For a long time it was thought to be unhackable, but that changed recently.

I find it hilarious that they're hacking, leaking the hacks to weaken it, and using it at the same time.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

TOR may have come up in the news before, I never heard of it as a browser. Personally I find firefox 31 with no script reasonable web safety for my transactions.

My curiosity about tor is more for the totalitarian regimes. Can people use it to access news of the world that would be censored? If the world is going to become more open and tolerant maybe it should be accessible in foreign lands. The downside is the shit disturbers that want to use it for illegal (by western standards) activity. How can that be resolved?