The Trappings

Released in 2003, Tor is a piece of software that allows its users to tunnel through the internet, ignoring international boundaries. It has enabled citizens living under harsh dictatorship to access non-government sanctioned web sites and helps in the eternal pursuit of anonymity while browsing. There’s a lot to be said about the Tor network as well as its potential uses and abuses. However that is not the thrust of this post. I’ll come back to that another day.

I’m no freedom fighter or oppressed journalist. No sir, I play games. And I want to buy games at the cheapest price possible. In order to do this sometimes I need to buy games from a different international territory. US gamers often get much nicer prices than the rest of the world, while people living in the EU generally get absolutely and completely stiffed, often with 1:1 pricing from dollars to euros. Right now, Borderlands in the US Steam store is retailing at $44.99, while here in Spain it’s going for €44.99. Convert the euros to dollars and we see that europeans are paying $66.36 at current exchange rates. What a crock!

So, how do they know where you’re from and how do we get around their sensing lasers? Steam, the EA store and many others check your IP address when you browse to their websites and redirect you to appropriately localised pages. So the IP address is the give away here. What you need is some way of appearing as if you’re browsing from an IP address located in another country…

OK, enough caterwauling. You look like the sort of person who needs cheaper games. You also strike me as the kind of man, woman or child with a taste for messing with your computer a bit. If I’ve got you wrong then walk away now. What we’re going to be doing isn’t that hard but if you’re afraid of installing software and editing text files then stop here.

For this example I’m going to tunnel through a UK IP address so that the Steam store offers me the prices and discounts offered to the vile English.

1. Download Tor. I downloaded the Windows Browser Bundle, but the Installed versions work just fine too.
2. Extract the bundle to a folder of your choice.
3. Fire up Vidalia and Tor by double clicking the “Start Tor Browser” icon in the folder you extracted to. If you downloaded the Browser Bundle then a copy of Firefox and Pidgin will open as well. Close pidgin but keep the Firefox window open.
4. In the Vidalia window that pops up, click on “View the Network”.
5. Click the top of the column filled with flags to sort the entries by country. Now scroll down the list until you reach the UK entries.


Here you can see the list of UK Relays available at the time of writing.

6. Click on one of the UK relays and look at the small box in the bottom right corner of the window. See the IP address? We’re going to need that. Write it down or copy and paste it in to a text document for later use.
7. Repeat step 6 with at least a couple of the UK entries. Better to have a number of relays available in case one of them craps out while we’re browsing.
8. Right, got a list of IP addresses? Good. Close the Tor Network Map.
9. Stop the Tor network by clicking the “Stop Tor” button in Vidalia.
10. Open the folder you extracted Tor into. Now, open the Data folder, and inside that, open the Tor folder.
11. Open the torrc file using notepad.
12. Add a line to the file which reads, ExitNodes followed by the IP addresses you noted down earlier separating each address with a comma. An example line might read:
    ExitNodes 83.191.37.194, 67.57.128.76, 240.56.17.3
13. Add another line which reads, StrictExitNodes 1
14. Save the file.
15. Start Tor.
16. In the Firefox window which Tor opened tap in www.steampowered.com and you should be presented with the UK Steam Store. Localisation circumvented!