What is TOR Network?
The purpose of TOR network is to offer anonymity to anyone who needs it. It will bounce your Internet traffic through different countries before it is sent the the server via an exit node, making it seem as if the exit node is you. By default, the exit node could be in any country. In this article, I will be showing you how to set up TOR network, so that you decide which country the exit node is.
TOR Network is used by both the good guys and the bad guys. The purpose of this article is to show you how to configure TOR. It is up to you to decide on responsible behavior.
Installing and configuring TOR
We would be using the Vidalia bundle, under windows, which can be downloaded by clicking on the button towards the right. You may install it with the default settings, or change it as you see fit.
Vidalia
Once you have installed Vidalia, it will connect to the TOR Network and you will be able to see the following screen. We are going to edit the “TOR Configuration File” to configure the “Exit Nodes” by clicking on Settings and then Advanced.
Vidalia - Advanced Settings
Copy the location of TOR Configuration File and open it in Notepad. (Start – Run – Notepad and in Notepad, File – Open (paste location).
At the bottom of the notepad you need to add a line “ExitNodes {US}” and “StrictExitNodes 1″ after which the notepad should look like the one in the screenshot below.
TOR Configuration File
ExitNodes {US}
StrictExitNodes 1
Save the file and reconnect to the TOR Network by clicking on Stop TOR and then Start TOR from the Vidalia Control Panel. It is possible that the relay you are connecting to might refuse connection when there are too many other clients connected to it. If you find yourself not getting connected, you may want to remove StrictExitNodes 1. This will ensure you are connecting to a relay in another country if none of the relays in United States is allowing connection.
If you want to configure some other country instead of US, you can do so by changing it to any other two letter ISO country codes. But you will have to check if there are any TOR relays in that country which you can connect to.
