# tor issues



## BlueCoder (Feb 10, 2013)

This appears to be networking month for me...

Ok so now I'm playing with tor and it's a education in proxies in general. To sum up (and please correct me where I'm wrong) http proxies are a different protocol than socks proxies for which there are version 4, 4a, and 5. The major improvement with socks 5 is authentication and ipv6.

Tor implements a socks proxy. To further complicate thing people tend to use it with two caching and filtering proxies by names of Polipo and Privoxy. The first tends to be more responsive but doesn't come configured to filter by default. The second does but it slower because it does and requires all the content to download before it forwards the contents to the user which the former sends partial streams as it gets them.

I'm using Opera as my web browser. I've configured tor using an IPv4 address in a jail on Freebsd 9.1. I dig into the browser and find where to enter the IP and port number for the tor proxy. It works.

But after reading more about it it seems the vast majority of application writers were idiots when it comes to adding the proxy operation to their applications. They either don't use dns resolutions through the proxy or fall back on local domain resolution. And while I can see this is an optional item to speed up connections I find it amazing that they all do it by default. It seems that web browser only considering proxies useful for caching data, nor for security or routing around firewalls. So they leak DNS queries.

So where I am now. I could undoubtedly install Polipo and it supposedly can help with the dns issue somehow but I wanted to try to get it installed without any caching first. Which I did but I have this dns resolution issue. I have yet to read how I can setup a dns to socks5 proxy in itself so I can just change resolv.conf.

I found a utility called torsocks that I believe acts similar to an API Spy utility I can remember using back on Windows 3.1; a dynamic library that loads itself in place of the real API. This utility is apparently trying reroute all network connections unbeknownst to the application or utility. I tried it on opera from the command line. (Tip to any newbies out there: run GUI apps from the command like so you can read all the error messages that it prints out to console!).

Right now it seems to work with Firefox but both Chrome and Opera give me a "This is not an HTTP proxy" web page.


----------

