Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx to work as anonymous browser

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Hallo Thorsten.

Thorsten Glaser wrote in <Pine.BSM.4.64L.1910032039230.26238@herc.mirbsd\
.org>:
 |>I have no idea of tor except that i have tor-control-spec.txt and
 |>tor-socks-extensions.txt since 2017 locally.  And yes i have even
 |
 |I haven’t, maybe I should, but I haven’t really used Tor anyway.
 |
 |>read it once by then.  There is a RESOLVE (plus RESOLVE_PTR)
 |>extension (and maybe more) there, but since lynx is a browser not
 |>a DNS resolver i think this is not of interest for it.  The patch
 |
 |Erm… there is‽ The browser needs to resolve hostnames, and if a
 |proxy is used there should be the option to let the proxy do that.
 |
 |In the case of Tor this is needed for both functionality (their
 |extra TLD) and anonymity.
 |
 |>uses the RFC standardized way of passing the hostname we want to
 |>connect to for real to the SOCKS5 proxy, it will perform the DNS
 |>lookup for us, and report it back.  So the only DNS lookup which
 |>lynx performs itself is the resolution of the socks proxy address.
 |
 |Ah, good. And if that’s given as numeric v4/v6 address, even that
 |is elided, I assume.

Well i'd say yes.  I have refrained from looking deeper into the
Lynx DNS machinery, which has even more compatibility than only
gethostname / getaddrinfo if i recall correctly.  But i would
assume that the C library tries to decode a hostname as an IP
address first, and simply uses it if it is one already.  (For our
purpose of resolving a hostname to IPv4 or IPv6 at least.)
Looking into my old resolver i see this is even a standardized, in
RFC 1123, section 2.1: the user is allowed to enter an IP address
directly.  (I had forgotten this is even standardized!)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)