Setting system timezone

Continuing with UTC as default, can we add an option to set the system time to another timezone?

Motivation:

  1. Make it more difficult for a site to classify origin as Whonix user in some case. E.g. Japanese site that receives Tor traffic in Japanese timezone but sees the host has UTC timezone. Can be a UK-based Japanese staying up at nights, otherwise a Japan-based Whonix user.
  2. In Tor before VPN setup, the site observes server (VPN) time is different than host time. That can be a reason to discriminate against / suspect this traffic, even if the VPN server itself isn’t blacklisted. Same with Tor before Proxy.
  3. Similarly to (2), if user sets his own VPN on a VPS, he can set the timezone on the VPS to UTC, however some sites block non-local traffic.

Mentioned here (Socks5 for Germany - although the user probably had other issue, and the case of Tor before VPN for another user):

Related discussions:

Should be possible as per Whonix ™ - Anonymous Operating System and Free Support for Whonix ™.


Whonix specific part:

https://github.com/Whonix/timezone-utc

Relevant script:

Getting rid of the Whonix specific part currently has bad usability. (as per Debian Packages - Whonix)

I added a mechanism to skip arbitrary Debian packaging maintenance scripts developed by Whonix just now.

Not yet in package updates.

The instructions would be:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/timezone-utc_maint.d

file /etc/timezone-utc_maint.d/50_user.conf

SKIP_SCRIPTS+=" timezone-utc.postinst "

That would get rid of timezone-utc.postinst.


https://github.com/Whonix/timezone-utc/blob/master/debian/timezone-utc may also give you ideas how to change the timezone.

  • /etc/localtime
  • /etc/timezone

Thanks. Part of the last link was trimmed, I believe it should be

https://github.com/Whonix/timezone-utc/blob/master/debian/timezone-utc.postinst

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My above post is obsolete. This is now documented in Whonix wiki. See: