Re: Making package.el talk over Tor

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> Thanks for replying to my question a month ago.
> I got so backlogged I just saw the reply.
>
>   > > Can someone tell me where to find the code that actually
>   > > communicates with the ELPA repos?  Where is the best place
>   > > to make that change?
>
>   > Isearching for 'url-' reveals that the following functions use the URL
>   > package to access the HTTP server: 'package--with-work-buffer',
>   > 'package--archive-file-exists-p' and'package--with-response-buffer-1'.
>
>   > But I think a better/safer solution will be to use torsocks.
>
> I agree, and I plan to use torsocks.  But in order to do thst, I need
> to know where to do that.  That's really what my question was about.
>
> Can you suggest where I should do that?
>
> Does the url package have a variable to specify the command to use?
> I could specify torsocks there.

No, url.el eventually calls `make-network-process', that directly
invokes the respective networking system calls, not making it possible
to interject torsocks.  What I believe Akib meant was to start Emacs
with torsocks, but to my understanding this is not a recommended
practice either, because one will continue to leak fingerprintable
metadata (specially inside of Emacs) that would undermine the point of
using Tor to begin with.