It bothers me that my Tor usage is less than I'd like because it is just so fiddly.

When it comes to privacy I want to keep things simple, I want to use tor, but I dont want to use it for things that aren't sane.

In practise that means I want to use tor for a small amount of browsing:

• When the host is a.com, b.com, & c.com
• When the traffic is not over SSL.

To do that I have to install privoxy, and use that with a configuration file like this:

# don't forward by default.
forward-socks4   /    .
# don't forward by default, even more so for HTTPS
forward-socks4   :443 .

# but we do want tor on these three sites:
forward-socks4   a.com/       127.0.0.1:9050 .
forward-socks4   b.com/       127.0.0.1:9050 .
forward-socks4   c.com/       127.0.0.1:9050 .

I'm using absolutely nothing else in my Privoxy configuration, so it seems like overkill.

I'd love to hear about a simple rule-based proxy-chaining tool - if there is one out there then I'd love to know about it lazyweb.

If not it shouldn't be too hard to write one with the Net::Proxy & Net::Socks module(s).

<global>
  listen 1234
  no-proxy
</global>

<sites>  
  hostname one.com
  port != 443
  proxy socks localhost 8050
</sites>

<sites>  
  hostname two.com
  port != 443
  proxy socks localhost 8050
</sites>

<sites>
  hostname foo.com
  port = 80
  proxy localhost 8000
</sites>

Tags: privoxy, todo, tor | 7 comments