Spoofing location - possible?

[buralex at gmail.com]

  Jamie McCarthy <jamie at mccarthy.vg> said on May 05, 2008 12:38 -0400 
(in part):
> Please forgive me for not doing more thorough research before
> emailing. I'm not part of the Tor community and not really
> interested in getting too into it. I'm just looking for some quick
> advice.
I've done even less research than Jamie had for his question and I think 
have less technical background than he but ...

I came to TOR looking not so much for the ability to surf anonymously 
but to convince my end target that I'm from a particular country. 
Primarily to allow use of streaming media (radio and video) from sites 
that restrict access to those from the United States.

I set up TOR and verified using http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/ that when 
using TOR I was usually identified as coming from a different country 
than my location (CANADA). From my limited understanding I would need a 
means to request/require that my exit node be in a particular country 
(ie. USA)

In the TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ I found these links that seem somewhat on 
point:
https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ComparisonCommercialOneHop 
and
https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ComparisonProxyAggregators 


so ... is what I'm looking for possible?
and assuming it is ... is there any prospect that TOR would be able to 
deliver enough throughput for effective streaming?

ANSWER: YES!! (google video works) so  did http://www.pandora.com/ 
(streaming radio - not available non-US locations) but only briefly. 
Maybe I was temporarily using a US-exit node? Attempting to get 
streaming US television from big three www.cbs.com, www.abc.com and 
www.nbc.com all failed with error messages about US-locations only. (I 
was able to get one "deleted scene" from NBC but when I tried the next 
one  got the "you can't watch this from where you are" message)

Now that I've verified (I think) that speed is fine, is there any way to 
request an exit point from a particular country?

oops ... almost missed this down at the bottom -
http://security.ngoinabox.org/Documentation/Misc/tor.eff.org/TorFAQ.html#Blossom 
referred to near the top in
http://security.ngoinabox.org/Documentation/Misc/tor.eff.org/TorFAQ.html#ChooseEntryExit 
which says:
> If you want to choose the exit node for a specific request, you can 
> give the hostname as hostname.nickname.exit (eg.  
> http://cnn.com.myfavoritetornode.exit). This will work fine if you're 
> using Privoxy. You can also install
> Blossom, which is a client-side Tor controller that lets you specify 
> what country you want to exit from when accessing a given resource.
but the link to Blossom: http://afs.eecs.harvard.edu/~goodell/blossom/ 
gives a 404 and according to the internet archive 
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://afs.eecs.harvard.edu/~goodell/blossom/ 
was last available "live" on Jun 01, 2007. Quick read there seems to say 
that it used a Python script and depended on some additional web pages:
> Implementation
>
> Our implementation of Blossom uses the onion routing network Tor as a 
> substrate and consists of the following components:
>
>     * Blossom itself, written in Python.
>     * A comprehensive web page providing the status of nodes in the 
> Blossom Network, including the address, capacity, operating system, 
> and exit policy of each Blossom forwarder. [We also have a web page 
> providing the status of nodes in the Tor Network.]
>     * edgeproxy, an HTTP proxy that provides a very basic Blossom 
> functionality to web browsers; this daemon relays traffic between a 
> web browser and another proxy such as Privoxy.
>     * The Blossom User Interface, which provides an intuitive way to 
> view web pages from the perspective of specified nodes in the Tor network.
>
> We also have some experimental results.
so .... is there any way for a non-technical Windows XP user to 
accomplish my goal?

Regards ... Alec -- buralex-gmail
--