I got interested in the Tor Project [1,2]. After a day of playing with it, I
must say it works rather well (although it's operating slowly on Win-XP
with the Firefox plugin ... Torbutton?)

So just a FYI on how to make yourself invisible with curl and Tor.
If you don't mind the sluggishness that it, see below. Once you have
the Tor program running (not so easy to configure), it is quite easy to hide
your curl traffic thanks to the socks-support in curl. Tor includes a SOCKS4/5
server at port 9050. But a simple proof of concept:

curl -o vg.html -v --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 http://www.vg.no

* Couldn't find host www.vg.no in the _netrc file; using defaults
* About to connect() to proxy localhost port 9050 (#0)
..

Some timing:
  The above download via SOCKS5 and Tor downloads took a whopping 21 seconds.
  A direct download takes only 560 msec !!

I run WireShark on the side and see all traffic seemingly anonymous (no
traffic to my normal DNS-servers either, good). See the pcap file here:
http://home.broadpark.no/~gvanem/misc/curl-with-tor.pcap.

--gv

[1] https://www.torproject.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

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Received on 2011-03-30