Who am I?, Feature Request

What do I mean by "Who am I?"?. Good question. When I am using TORR, I have no idea who (what IP address) I am. I have "Show IP" a very good extension that shows me the IP address of the Web Site where I am browsing, but I need to know what IP address that Web Site thinks I am at the moment when using TORR. I need to know what my TORR IP address is and when it changes, I need to know what it has changed to. This way if my IP address changes to one which is undesirable, I can choose to change identity through Vidalia.

I think that a function like this would be a great addition to FoxyProxy, or it would be a great idea for another add-in.

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the suggestion. It would be a good addition, but off the top of my head I don't see an elegant way to do this platform-independently. The only thing I can think of is a periodic polling to sites like http://ipchicken.com. That would be effective, but not very elegant because you wouldn't know the moment your IP changed. Moreover, it'd be bandwidth-heavy for the rather slow tor network. Any ideas?

-Eric

You could do it by letting Foxyproxy connect to itself through Tor. That would be twice as fast as querying an external site (but it would still be slow). And if you're NAT:ed or firewalled (which most people are most of the times) it won't work.

There's a PAC function called myIpAddress() which does this already, but not everyone uses PAC files.

This is the deal-breaker for me. In any case, I've thought of another way to do it.

That'll give you your actual IP address, not the one after being proxied by Tor.

Please explain how to get FoxyProxy to connect to itself through Tor? You don't mean a loopback because that wouldn't give the WAN-facing IP. So how would I do this?

Let's assume you have the IP address 84.55.75.73 and you're not behind a firewall or a NAT device. You tell the Firefox proxy functions (or the Foxyproxy functions if you connect to Privoxy/Tor directly without using any built-in Firefox proxy functions) to proxy connections to 84.55.75.73, even though it is your own address[1]. Then you send a packet to 84.55.75.73 on port 61524 or whatever. Privoxy/Tor will, AFAIK, go out on the Tor network regardless what IP address you ask for[2], so the connection will be routed via Peru, Hong Kong, Düsseldorf or wherever, and then it will travel back to you at 84.55.75.73. Foxyproxy then listens to 61524, and catches the source address of that packet. And voila, you now know what address you've got when your packet leaves the Tor network. Send a packet once a minute or something. If you want to make sure that it is the same packet, put some semirandom data in it to compare with, or use the TCP sequence number.

If [1] and [2] are possible, it should be doable. If [1] or [2] is not possible, just tell me to go back to sleep. And even if they are possible, it won't work with firewalls/NAT, which I guess might make it not worth the effort, so I'll go back to sleep anyway...

What about FoxyProxy periodically hitting a page like http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/reflect.php and displaying the results? I can make the page configurable instead of hardcoding that URL (some places block the foxyproxy.mozdev.org domain).

Regardless of how this is done, where do you want the IP address displayed?

Can't you get the information out of Tor/Privoxy/Vidala? If you look at the Tor network (the world map window) in the Privoxy (or is it Vidala?) GUI, you can see what IP address you have at the moment. In other words, there is a way to get that information out of the application. Try to find out how, and let Foxyproxy use the same API calls?

I'm not the one wanting the information. Mark Westin is. If I had the power to allocate your time, I would allocate it on TAB specific proxies, and not on displaying Tor IP addresses.

Many people, including myself, use FoxyProxy without Tor. I need a solution which works for those people as well as people who use Tor. Polling an external page like http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/reflect.php might be the only way to do that. I'm open to other ideas.

In any case, Mark Westin seems to be MIA and you're not so I'd really appreciate ideas from you on where to display the IP address (statusbar? FoxyProxy Options dialog?)

It's coming, as you know.

Not the dialog. If you'd put it there, I could just as well bookmark http://www.whatsmyip.org/ instead.

I'd put it in the tooltip of the FoxyProxy icon on the statusbar or/and on the toolbar button. Now it says "FoxyProxy: Default" (or whatever proxy you're using). Make the tooltip say "FoxyProxy: Default. IP: X.X.X.X" instead?

(Sorry for the late respons.)