RE: Choose exitnodes in country x

[Cat Okita <cat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Wesley -

I'm going to presume that your email isn't advertising a commercial service,
which I'd certainly find to be in dubious taste, both from the standpoint
of inappropriate advertising, and from the moral standpoint of profiting
from the goodwill of others.

However - could you say a word-or-five about the privacy and anonymity
implications of connecting directly to your well known site, and then
asking for a specific exit node?

It seems to me that you're not only encouraging people to make highly
identifiable connections to a single location (stunnel or OpenVPN to your
servers), which would then be an excellent target for compromising
anonymity - but you're also then encouraging people to reduce their
anonymity by selecting extremely specific exit nodes, making it again,
easier to identify and target them.

I note that you're saying that Vidalia and Privoxy won't be required - is
your plan to run all of the user traffic through your server, and then
through the Tor network?

A comment on the implications of using a caching web proxy for Tor
users on your server would be interesting as well.

cheers!

On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, Wesley Kenzie wrote:
> pickaproxy.com and geospoofing.com will be offering this functionality as a
> server-side service - you will be able to choose an exit node in
> country/state/city/ISP/Org so that the server can then setup a long-lived
> Tor circuit for you - you will then be advised on how to configure your
> workstation proxy settings, with regard to port number and domain/host name.
> This does not require you to install Tor on your machine, or to upgrade it
> when new versions come around.  Nor will Vidalia or Privoxy be required on
> the workstation.
>
> We will offer options to use stunnel or OpenVPN connections to our server
> (your proxy).  And we're looking at using polipo (on the server) to speed
> things up.
>
> We have multiple sources of geolocation data so they will be more accurate
> than the open source GeoIP library - we pay for them where the license
> requires us to.
>
> . . .
> Wesley Kenzie
> WebMaster, showmyip.com, etc.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-or-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-or-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Robert Hogan
> Sent: July 3, 2007 12:58 PM
> To: or-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Choose exitnodes in country x
>
>
> On Tuesday 03 July 2007 15:35:21 you wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > it would be nice to have the ability to choose only exitnodes in
> > country X. Additional to "ExitNodes nickname, ..." something like this
> > "ExitCountry country, ..." would be nice.
> > country should be the official TLD code I think
> > http://www.iana.org/root-whois/index.html
> >
> > There is more and more censorship at websites that only allows
> > visitors from specific countries or show different content.
>
> As Jonathan Yu pointed out there is no particularly reliable method for
> choosing by country, geoip is the closest match out there.
>
> TorK uses geoip to offer a 'Citizen Of' feature, where you choose the
> country
> you want to 'browse the internet from', i.e. use exitnodes from only that
> country.
>
> --
>
> Browse Anonymously Anywhere	- http://anonymityanywhere.com
> TorK	- KDE Anonymity Manager	- http://tork.sf.net
> KlamAV	- KDE Anti-Virus 	- http://www.klamav.net

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