[OTR-users] using TOR + socks with OTR + Pidgin

[Richard James Salts]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2014 17:47:24 Guy Heatley wrote:
> On 06/01/2014 16:29, Jurre van Bergen wrote:
> > Actually. I wouldn't recommend using Pidgin with 'usewithtor'. The
> > latest versions of Pidgin has a very specific functionality build in to
> > handle DNS leaks over Tor! As can be seen in this screenshot I took:
> > http://i.imgur.com/trUwsi9.png
> 
> Hmm this is interesting! I have noticed a strange thing about using a
> local TOR proxy with pidgin:
> As in the image above, it seems that if you select
> "Tor/Privacy (SOCKS5)"
> from the proxy types, it only works if you use the IP address of the
> local machine (127.0.0.1) rather than the host name (e.g. localhost).
> 
> If you select simply "SOCKS5" from the list, you CAN use either IP
> address OR hostname for the local machine.
> 
> Previously (until I saw your image) it had never occurred to me to use
> the IP address, and I always thought that the Tor-specific selection was
> somehow broken, as it never worked using "localhost".
> 
> I always used Tor via the non Tor-specific "SOCKS5" selection.
> 
> I wonder if this is a bug in Pidgin that should be reported?

You sure it's not something in /etc/hosts, I'd guess specifically that 
localhost is pointing to both ::1 and 127.0.0.1 and it's trying ipv6 socket 
first and failing. The 127.0.0.1 works fine as this is where the socks proxy is 
set up and there is no ambiguity about it as there is with localhost.


> --
> Guy
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