The aim is to provide every Internet user with the opportunity to surf the Internet without fearing censorship or prosecution. The Freedom Stick basically contains a version of TOR and a Firefox browser that can be used to connect to the Internet through The Onion Network.

It was designed with ease of use in mind. Just download the archive from the Chinese Wall page of the German Chaos Computer Club and unpack the contents on the USB device. If autostart is enabled the system should automatically start the Vidalia Control Panel which establishes the connection with the Tor network. Firefox is opened i that connection is successful and the user can surf the Internet using the anonymity of the Tor network.

The stick is only working on Windows operating systems. Linux users on the other hand usually know about these things and are able to implement them easily as well.

Many workarounds exist that help users access those services even if they are currently residing in a different country. One possibility that I would like to explain today is to configure Tor that way that the exit node lies in the country that you want to access the service in. Tor offers lots of so called nodes which are servers in a specific country running the Tor software.

I’m using Vidalia, a package that contains all necessary programs, to explain how a specific country can be selected when using Tor. Download Vidalia and install the software afterwards. The main program interface should load after the installation.

The control panel is displaying the current status of Tor. Additional information are displayed which we are going to use to find servers located in the country that we need an IP address from. A click on View the network displays a visual representation of all Tor servers but only if Tor is running.

Servers can be sorted by country flag and do have a performance indicator next to them as well. Write down some server names with the best performance and leave the menu again. We need to add those servers as exit nodes to the Tor configuration. A click on Settings and there on the advanced tab displays a menu where you find the entry Tor Configuration Menu.

A click on browse opens the browse for files dialog. Left-click on the file “torrc” and choose edit from that menu. Now add the following two lines to the configuration, just paste it at the beginning for instance:

ExitNodes server1, server2, server3
StrictExitNodes 1

Replace server1, server 2 and so on with the server names that you have written down in the network display window. Stop and restart Tor afterwards and the changes should have been made.

Now we have to add a http proxy to our browser. Firefox users click on Tools > Options > Advanced Network and there on the button Settings. Select Manual Proxy Configuration and enter localhost and port 8118 there.

You can test if everything is working fine by visiting my IP lookup script which should display a IP from the country that you have selected the servers from.