TOR in 2024
June 2024 - It has been a few years since I played around with The Onion Router. I guess the reason is mainly that I have not had the need to use it.
Downloading the new package for Windows I see a much cleaner interface. Looking back at my earlier page I see that there are lots of things that may have changed. The ability to change your identity and to change the way that TOR connects have been vastly improved.
The installation of the TOR Secure Browser was a breeze and it did not require any setup from my part. I am sure that I can make configuration changes in all good time.
Observing the behavour as installed it seems that the "circuit" changes after a time-out (I will have to check this in the help files)
The "select new circuit" only works on the current tab.
Using Tor to disguise your location
This is the reason that I am interested in using TOR again. At the moment I can't see how I can have the control that I had worked out when I was using TOR to "exit" in a specific country.
At the moment the ability to be able to connect from an apparent IP that is not my assigned one is all that I want.
Testing Google Analytics
Google say that they are going to retire Universal Analytics in July 2024. So far I seem to be tracking accesses using Analytics 4 but using the tracking ID from when I first setup Universal Analytics.
In the meantime the use of TOR enables me to check that I have the tracking code that still works on the pages I see accessed. If the tracking breaks after July 2024 I may have to reassess my implementation of GA4.
Correlation of GA report of IP with server log
This does not seem to happen. The Exit Server reported by TOR is different to the one in the server log. However, the IP address is not mine!
Submitting forms on Wordpress
This does not seem to work well.
When I submit a form it registers in the feedback log but the message (email) does not get sent. I am presuming this is a security feature that the Jetpack form block has built in when it detects an access from a web address that cannot be tracked.
Continuing with this experiment it is not clear whether a submission does record in either the Feedback Log or an email sent to the Wordpress user that the Form Block has configured. (Karaoke Night)
The submission of forms using TOR does not seem to be viable. However, the Wordpress "owner" is likley to be wondering why there are so many "unknown" accesses in their statistics. Such owners are also likely to be of the frame of mind that Facebook "Likes" are important measures of their popularity.
Tehran
It is interesting that the origin of many accesses are reported by Google Analytics when one of my pages is made via TOR it is from Tehran. This is also accompanied by the detection of "robot" activity that results in a CAPTCHA
torrc and ExitNodes
When I was in Canada I used to configure TOR to exit in the UK. Now I live in the UK I no longer need to do that. However, I may wish to force an "exit" in a specific country.
It seems that I have to set both EntryNode and ExitNode. Setting the EntryNode to {gb} (for the UK) fails to establish a connection.
EntryNodes {us} StrictNodes 1ExitNodes {gb} StrictNodes 1
The question is: "why would you want to do this?". Well, if you are trying to confuse the owner of a website where all their visits are originating. If the website is in the UK then visits from around the world will only look like spamming.
The assignment of a UK Exit Server results in only a few IP addresses. I am guessing that this is due to the limited number of computers that are setup to do this in the UK.
An observation is that the visits from the UK seem to come from London, as detected by Google Analytics.
Bitninja - Siteprotection