> 1527
I disagree
If you use only 3 hops, and all traffic stays within the country of origin, then they can deanonymize you with cross-correlation, wit 70-80% accuracy, by cross correlating the input and output streams and looking at bit rate as the selector for the time series.
I say use as many as seems reasonable for your application, and jump very far away from your physical location. I found that file transfers for endtube/ oldtube became very slow after around 8-9 hops. so I backed that off to 7. For a sensitive application (endmail) mod it for 12 hops.
I use tor browser, and links -g for browsing and posting, my tor router is ruunning on a headless server and I route the traffic to the tor proxy port (9050) on that machine on the network, from my x org client. I have this modded for 7 hops, then when it comes out the other end it connects to 3 hops when using the tor browser, but the final exit of the 7 hops for the proxy connection, is the start of the 3 hops for the tor browser conenction. When i'm browsing for the most part I use links -g with 7 hops chained to the headless tor proxy machine. when I need to do web 2.0 , I use tor browser proxied through the tor router proxy machine.
I have found that this is a significant improvment in anonymity.
> 1538
The ISP will know that you're using Tor. If you jump on the first hop to a distant country and bounce around 12 times in adjacent or distant coutries, it's less likely that your host country (the one that you're trying to evade) will have infrastructure in all 12 of those locations to perform robust analysis. If your circuit switches every 30-60 seconds, then the statistics for the cross-correlation will get scrambled because the time delays will keep changing every 30 seconds.
In general just watching is safer than actively posting.
The people who try to get you to keep it stock but then don't give logical reasons why this is better (appealing to authority etc) are not looking out for you. They have an automated system to deanonymize Tor, and it works best with stock Tor browser with 3 hops. It's been used against me. Since I've switched to long chain hops, I've had less problems.
IF you want to download stuff 7-9 is the boundary. If you're just sending messages beack and forth, 12-15 hops should be sufficient. Your first hop should be very far away, out of your jurisdictin, and subsequent hops should traverse as many countries as possible. That's my advice. I've found this strategy helpful.