What is torsocks?
-----------------
This is a fork of the tsocks project (http://sourceforge.net/project/
showfiles.php?group_id=17338). The purpose of this fork is to maintain a
working implementation of tsocks that is primarily useful for Tor.

The project homepage is:

http://code.google.com/p/torsocks


Using torsocks
--------------
Torsocks allows you to use most socks-friendly applications in a safe way with Tor.
Once you have installed torsocks, just launch it like so:

  usewithtor [application]

So, for example you can use ssh to a some.ssh.com by doing:

  usewithtor ssh username@some.ssh.com 

or launch pidgin by doing:

  usewithtor pidgin 

The following applications are known to be compatible with usewithtor:

Type  Application   Comments
COMM  ssh
COMM  telnet        (plaintext passwords are not recommended with Tor)
IM    pidgin
IM    kopete
IRC   konversation
MAIL  claws-mail
DEV   svn
IRC   xchat
IRC   irssi
IRC   silc


Differences between torsocks and tsocks
----------------------------------------
A complete history of changes is maintained in the Changelog. The initial
working copy of torsocks was obtained through the following steps in June
2008:

  - Tsocks was downloaded from the project's sourceforge repository.
    (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17338)
  - All patches listed at http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/
    TSocksPatches in March 2008 were applied. In particular, the patch
    from Total Information Security that hooks DNS requests and passes
    them to Tor. The original link for this patch is now dead and the
    authors are no longer available at the email addresses supplied in
    the patch's source.
  - Weasel's getpeername() patch and some build-related patches from
    https://giig.ugr.es/~rgarcia/tsocks/ were applied.
  - All references to tsocks in the project source files were renamed
    to torsocks.
  - The project was then migrated to an automake/autoconf build system.

To help with reconstructing the above steps a list of applied patches is
available in the patches/ subdirectory of the torsocks source tree.

Enhancements unique to torsocks
-------------------------------
The first release of torsocks contained the following enhancements:

  - Torifying reverse dns requests through gethostbyaddr()
  - Blocking of UDP traffic from sendto() and its variants.
  - Use of Tor-friendly defaults if no configuration file available.
  - The addition of all RFC defined private address ranges to the
    default configuration.

Maintainers of Torsocks
-----------------------
Torsocks is maintained by: Robert Hogan (robert at roberthogan.net)
                           Ruben Garcia (ruben at ugr.es)


Links
-----

Original tsocks project (apparently abandoned):
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17338

Ruben's fork of tsocks on which this is based:
https://giig.ugr.es/~rgarcia/tsocks/

The Tor project's list of tsocks patches:
http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TSocksPatches

The Tor project:
https://www.torproject.org