Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sometimes you want to pretend you're from somewhere else. Fortunately, there's no Law of the Internet that requires you to divulge your IP address, and thereby where, and (for all intents and purposes) who, you are. You can instead rely on the kindness of strangers who will form a virtual bucket chain to carry your data from one place to another, with nobody involved (or any evesdroppers) knowing anything more than the location of the next link in the chain. For this recipe you will need:

• Tor
• Vidalia
• Privoxy
• FoxyProxy

All of the above can be found in the package repositories for Debian. For some reason Ubuntu doesn't appear to have FoxyProxy, but as it's a web browser extension it's trivial to install from it's upstream source.

Tor does the majority of the work here, Vidalia is a convenient GUI for starting/stopping and configuring Tor. Privoxy is a web proxy which allows web browsers and other applications redirect their webrequests to your local copy of Tor, and thereafter to the global Tor network. FoxyProxy gives us a convenient interface for switching proxying on and off in Firefox. Because Tor routes your data in a way that's designed to be untraceable, the routes taken tend to be longer, and noticeably slower, than a direct HTTP connection, so you probably won't want to use it all the time.

On installation (in Debian-based systems at least), you will be asked how you would like Vidalia to interact with Tor. The default option "Permanent takeover" is the simplest, but not appriopriate on a multi-user machine where more than one user will want to use Tor. In such cases you will have to configure Tor yourself by editing it's system-wide configuration file manually. Under "Permanent takeover" Vidalia runs Tor off a configuration file it keeps in your home directory.

Tor and Vidalia just work out of the box; launch Vidalia and click on the big "Start Tor" button. Privoxy requires one line of configuration added to the /etc/privoxy/config file to let it know you want to forward connextions to Tor:

forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

To actually use what you've just set up, you need to create a new proxy service with FoxyProxy (call it whatever you want) and direct it to port 8118 (where Privoxy lives) on your local machine like so:

From now on, you can right click on the FoxyProxy icon in Firefox and quickly switch between using Privoxy/Tor, and no proxy.

How do you know it's working? Go here, and it should tell you you're using Tor.

This configuration is one of the most fundamental tools in your kit for anonymising your browsing, protecting your privacy, and circumventing censorship. However on it's own, it's not bulletproof, so please don't stake your life on it.

You can also go one better than disguising who and where you are. You can actively pretend to be from somewhere you're not, which is a lot more useful than you might think. Many websites make unwarranted assumptions about what you want to (or what you should) access based on where in the world they think you are. If you're an expat visiting home via the web, or you like to see you yourself as a citizen of the world, and you don't want to be treated like a foreigner, adding the following to your Tor configuration file (in the above setup, found in your home directory at ~/.vidalia/torrc) gives you instant local credentials:

StrictExitNodes 1
ExitNodes {gb}

The above will certify you as a true Brit. You can replace "gb" with the ISO two character country code of your choice. It's actually just asking the Tor network to ensure that the last link in the chain, the one that makes the direct request to a website, should be in the country you specify. You can make sure it's working properly by visiting this useful website. You will need to restart Tor (via the control panel in Vidalia is the easiest way to do this) whenever you edit this file for your changes to take effect. If you're re-visiting a site under a diiferent national persona, you will probably also want to clear your browser cookies for that site to avoid any "does not compute" website glitches that result from you apparently teleporting instantaneously from country to country.