Assuming there are certain Tor notes being run by parties hostile to my own interests, what are the pros and cons of specifying one's own list of trusted entrance and exit nodes?
I run a Tor relay at home 24/7 and use that as my entrance point. I do this to provide cover traffic for my own Tor use as well as help out the network.
I also try to use Tor for all my daily web browsing when possible. This has given be a lot of headaches.
Besides the demoralizing barrage of Cloudfare captchas, I've had a lot of problems with dropped connections, timeouts, SSL cert warnings, fatal errors connecting to HTTPS sites. I started to get a gut feeling, warranted or not, that some exits nodes might be meddling with my traffic.
To combat this I changed the configuration on my local Tor relay to use only exit nodes run by organizations or people that I felt I could trust. I didn't bother with specifying entrance nodes because I could not see what the gain would be.
This seems to have curbed some of the problems, with the tradeoff that responsiveness is much more inconsistent.
I'm just curious if restricting exit nodes to a few dozen that you trust effectively defeats most of the purpose of using Tor. What would be the bare minimum of Tor exit nodes a person would need to use in order to make life difficult for the Panopticon surveillor scum?
If this post is more appropriate for Tor-talk, please let me know