Dear Tor-Talk, 

Once I heard about Tor's abilities to get a service out past NATs I was very 
excited.

Now I am stuck trying to reach it.

I'm trying to figure out the pieces of synchronizing my to-do list from my 
computer's WebDAV server with my mobile device. On my mobile there's a 
companion app, it syncs fine over WiFi LAN when it's given my computer's IPv4 
address. 

But the problem is how to give my to-do list app on iOS the .onion address for 
the WebDAV server? 

1) Make a feature request to the app vendor to deal with the Tor network? I.e. 
embed Tor.

2) Find an app in a specific so-called walled-garden-app-store that promises to 
be my proxy so that one or more apps can deal with .onion addresses? I.e. some 
app that's embedded Tor. 

3) Submit yet another security enhancement request to a certain hardware/OS 
vendor. Mainly asking them to handle requests to .onion addresses at the OS 
level, thus negating this manual intervention. 

4) See what I can hack or cobble together on my own.


I have decided to go with v3 Onion Service. My computer runs both my to-do list 
keeper and the WebDAV server, although the latter is open to change. 

I’m motivated enough to write feature requests but realistic enough to know 
that unless they’ve been working on it for a while, what I ask for would be at 
least 1 major version away. So that’s #1 & #3 out of the way. 

With regards to #2, I’ve not inspected every app in a big name app store, but 
none of them seem to offer what I want; please correct me if I’m wrong. I see 
lots of web browsers, and plenty of for-hire external VPNs. 

But I don’t see anything where an on-device VPN/proxy server can be set up, 
similar to Charles Proxy; but with Tor-specific features. (Charles Proxy sets 
up a VPN connection to itself, it has a great blocking feature, but its DNS 
spoofing isn’t robust enough (best I can tell) for me to use it with .onion 
addresses. However, it may be that CP is the closest to what I want, so I may 
begin my feature requests there; to see if he will add Tor features and feature 
for Tor.)


Leaving #4 which is mostly two main options I think: 
Learn about or figure out some middleware device that plugs into the iOS 
device, and sits between it and .onion addresses. This sounds needlessly 
complex and expensive; ugly and easily misplaced.

The final option is to dream big about compiling my own multilayered Tor app. 

Since it will probably be a while before average mobile apps get the ability to 
talk to .onion addresses, it would be nice if there was some middle ground, 
on-device app, that handled translation between .onion and IPs for non-Tor 
aware apps. Allowing for some apps to be forced through Tor while other apps 
aren’t. 

Thank you. 
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