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Quick question - is it possible to 'exclude' or 'bypass' certain Tor Circuits?

Example: At this moment it shows the circuit as France - Netherlands - France. What I am wondering is, can I tell Tor to never use France in it's circuit selection? Reason being simple, France has notoriously slow servers and it slows down the whole browsing experience...

ezflip
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2 Answers2

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Yes you can.

Settings in torrc:

StrictNodes 1
ExcludeNodes {fr}

Read more on how to configure your torrc file here.

james-see
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Yes, this can be done by adding ExcludeNodes {fr} and StrictNodes 1, that said however...you should never, ever actually do this!

First of all, you can't stop your connection traversing France. If you pick a node in Italy and a node in Switzerland you may well traverse French networks.

Second of all, GeoIP is notoriously inaccurate and can be intentionally fooled. There are infact specific cases on the Tor network of nodes that lie about their location. For example this Tor Node according to GeoIP is supposedly in Liberia. It's not in Libera!

As such by excluding French nodes you are reducing the possible paths and exit points that you will use on the Tor network and harming your anonymity.

Shog9
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