Spoofing location - possible?

[Wesley Kenzie]

Alec, we have setup pickaproxy.com specifically for this purpose - to
geospoof your location and to eliminate the need to install and maintain Tor
and Vidalia.  Check it out.  Essentially we run (at present) a bunch of Tor
clients on our server that have strict exit nodes for a specific country, so
you don't lose your geolocation when the exit nodes get changed every 10
minutes.  We keep these refreshed every couple hours to make sure they work,
we only use fast nodes, and we make sure that strict entry nodes are also
used from a completely different country and continent to help mitigate
against privacy monitoring risks.  You have the option of using stunnel to
encrypt your connection to our server as well.

Wesley

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-or-talk at freehaven.net 
> [mailto:owner-or-talk at freehaven.net] On Behalf Of buralex at gmail.com
> Sent: May 6, 2008 4:05 AM
> To: or-talk at freehaven.net
> Subject: Spoofing location - possible?
> 
> 
>   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#Comp
> arisonCommercialOneHop 
> and 
> https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#Comp
> arisonProxyAggregators 
> 
> 
> 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/T
orFAQ.html#Blossom 
referred to near the top in
http://security.ngoinabox.org/Documentation/Misc/tor.eff.org/TorFAQ.html#Cho
oseEntryExit 
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
--