The Metaproxy is an important part of Subgraph OS. It runs in the background to help applications connect through the Tor network. This is done transparently, even with applications that are not configured or designed to work with Tor.
On other operating systems, users must specifically configure applications to connect to the Internet through Tor. This normally requires the user to configure proxy settings of the application to connect through Tor's built-in proxies. Some applications do not support or honor proxy settings. To use Tor with these applications, users often run them with using a command-line helper called torsocks to torify the application. This is a lot of work for users.
Configuring proxies or torifying applications by hand is not an adequate solution for Subgraph OS. Usability and maintainability are issues with this approach. In Subgraph OS, some applications simply would not work if there is no easy way to route them through Tor. This is because Subgraph OS blocks outgoing connections that are not routed through Tor. This is to prevent accidental privacy leaks. If an application has no way to communicate over Tor, it may not be able to access the network at all.
The Metaproxy addresses this problem by automatically relaying outgoing connections through Tor. When we say this is done transparently, we mean the following two things:
- Users do not have to manually torify their applications or otherwise configure them to use Tor
- Applications that are already configured to use Tor are ignored by the Metaproxy, therefore, it only helps those applications which need it
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