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. ]]]
>
>   > This sounds like a way to make the connection by running a shell
>   > command.  Maybe you could arrange for using this facility to do what
>   > you want?
>
> I have no idea.  I don't know how to make a program talk to anything
> over the net, either with Tor or without.

I tried out Eli's suggestion, and it seems to work:

(let ((conn
       (open-network-stream
	"test" (current-buffer) "gnu.org" "http"
	:type 'shell
	:shell-command "torsocks nc %s %p")))
  (process-send-string conn "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n"))

>
> I think all Emacs features to do something over the internet should
> give users a way to say "go through Tor".  (For most applicaions I
> think a global variable is the preferable way to specify this.)

If you have a Tor daemon running on your system, it should provide a
SOCKS proxy by default, meaning that you can configure every package
that uses url.el to go through this proxy (unless I have misunderstood
something):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(setq url-gateway-method 'socks
      socks-server '("Tor" "localhost" 9050 5))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

That being said, while testing I noticed that when connecting to a
server I have access to, I always receive two requests, one from a Tor
exit node and one from my current IP address.  Unless I missed something
obvious, that might be a bug.

> Can someone who knows how to do that please implement it for Emacs package.el?

FWIW As package.el doesn't directly use any low level networking, so the
:shell trick wouldn't be something that could be easily implemented.