The Debian Project, through Peter Palfrader, announced recently that its services and repositories for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system would be accessible through the Tor network.

To further enhance the anonymity and security of users when either accessing any of the Debian online services, such as the Debian website or Wiki, as well as when using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, the Debian Project partnership with the Tor Project to enable Tor onion services for many of their services.

The Tor onion routing method is widely-used around the globe by many people who want to remain anonymous while surfing the Internet, and the best way to do that is to either use the popular Tor Browser or the acclaimed Tails amnesic incognito live system. This way you'll have access to the Tor network for a great level of security.

"The freedom to use open source software may be compromised when access to that software is monitored, logged, limited, prevented, or prohibited," says Peter Palfrader. "As a community, we acknowledge that users should not feel that their every action is trackable or observable by others."

With this major change, the Debian Project guarantees to their users that they won't be tracked or monitored by any government agencies when they're using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and any of its related online services. For example, you can now update your Debian Linux OS only via secure Tor connections. The Debian Tor-enabled services can be viewed at https://onion.debian.org and https://onion.torproject.org.

Shortly, the Debian Project plans to enable Tor network access for more of its services, if not all, which will be the smartest move they ever did for the safety of their users. To enable Tor support in your Debian OS, you'll need to install the "apt-transport-tor" package, which will replace the current mirrors with Tor-enabled ones (see below an example apt configuration file).