Emacs: Torifying Elfeed (publ. 2024-06-20)
Currently I use elfeed as my feedreader for Web feeds. (I use a different system for gemini feeds.) There are some other approaches in Emacs I might explorer later, like Gnus feed backends, but for now elfeed is convenient. The only thing that bothered me about using elfeed is that the fetches are not routed through Tor (torified). Fortunately, this is easy to setup in elfeed, because elfeed uses cURL on the backend, which is SOCKS5 capable. This assumes you have the Tor daemon installed — an exercise left to the reader — and that you know what magic words to put into which variable.
Here is the generated line in the custom-set-variables section:
'(elfeed-curl-extra-arguments '("-x" "socks5h://localhost:9050"))
Though of course you could do that manually with
(setq elfeed-curl-extra-arguments '("-x" "socks5h://localhost:9050"))
Make certain to use "socks5h" instead of just "socks5". Otherwise, your plaintext DNS requests will not be torified, making it easy to see from which site you are requesting the feed.
Unfortunately, cURL does not yet handle the gemini protocol. If it did, it would be easy to use this setup for fetching RSS/Atom feeds on Gemini capsules. Somebody submitted a patch for that back in 2020, but the patch was rejected for various reasons:
[PATCH] New protocol: gemini
Copyright
This work © 2024 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed