[tor-dev] Windows Alternative of torsocks/tsocks ?

[Catalin Patulea]

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Hi Fabio,

> On 1/22/12 11:28 AM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>> See also TorCap2: http://www.virtualventures.ca/~cat/
>> but I've never succeeded at getting a license statement out of the author.
Roger, I'm sorry if I seemed uncooperative when you asked about the
licensing terms of TorCap2. I can see a reference to a discussion with
you back in 2006, but I no longer have copies of the actual
correspondence, so I don't recall what happened.

> Can you confirm whether the TorCap2 is licensed under BSD, GPL or other
> opensource license?
I have released TorCap2 under the LGPL 3.0 (I have updated the readme
and included a license.txt in the zip files). You can use TorCap2
as-is in an application of any license. Any modifications to TorCap2
must be published under the LGPL.

> at some Tor related Project we would like to use TorCap2 as a part of an
> OpenSource Project whose concept is described at
> https://piratenpad.de/p/AnonymousWebApplicationFramework .
On a technical note, I doubt that TorCap2 is the right approach here.
If you can limit yourself to support Python-only applications to
start, then a SOCKS client in Python that implements the same
interface as the 'socket' module seems like a much cleaner solution to
me. This is now platform-independent, less complex (easier to debug),
and gives the Python code the *option* between native sockets and
Tor-ified sockets, under the same interface. (maybe you want to check
connectivity.. or find the hosts's external IP by fetching a URL.. or
talk to hosts on the local network.. etc.)

Porting existing Python code would be a matter of search-replacing
'socket' with 'torsocket' (or even just 'import torsocket as socket').
Of course, with this design you would leak network traffic if you
spawned a separate process, or if you used a Python native library
that directly accesses the OS's socket API. But maybe it's good to
start with supporting Python-only applications initially, given the
complexity of Win32 API hooking..

Just my $0.02..

Catalin