Misconceptions of Tor and its Anonminity?

[Ironman]

I came across this article and it piqued my curiosity, with the NSA cracking down on everything. I always thought of Tor as a tool to anonymize a user's internet traffic, until I read the following article:
http://www.deseret-tech.com/journal/psa-tor-exposes-all-traffic-by-design-do-not-use-it-for-normal-web-browsing/

If Tor is only a tool to help circumvent Firewalls, then why do privacy freaks (there articles on Lifehacker all the time about it) post about using it all the time? For example, I have read that if people wanted to access the Silk Road Bitcoin market, they do so using Tor, which masks their IP but not their traffic? So wouldn't they still be susceptible to privacy infiltration?

[Salmon Trout]

Tor is not only a "tool to circumvent firewalls".  However many people seem to use it as such. As the writer you linked to says "Tor is extremely dangerous for the ordinary user. It must be used only for specific, carefully-planned sessions, or you risk exposing sensitive personal data to anyone running an exit node." Recently in a crackdown the FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network have been compromised, including TORmail. The FBI has also embedded a zero-day Javascript attack against Firefox 17 on Freedom Hosting's server. It appears to install a tracking cookie and a payload that phones home to the FBI when the victim resumes non-TOR browsing. Interesting implications for The Silk Road and the value of Bitcoin stemming from this. The attack relies on two extremely unsafe practices when using TOR: Enabled Javascript, and using the same browser for TOR and non-TOR browsing. Any users accessing a Freedom Hosting hosted site since 8/2 with javascript enabled are potentially compromised.