Use socks5h, not socks5 when using newsboat with Tor

Many people in the privacy community who use newsboat as their RSS reader will use Tor’s inbuilt Socks5 proxy. That causes newsboat to retrieve the feeds over the Tor network, to protect their identity from websites.

A good thing as unlike a VPN, your Tor exit often changes and is shared by far-more people (around every 10 minutes).

The problem is that like 99% of tutorials for setting up newsboat to use Tor have a “fetal” flaw. They tell the user to use “proxy-type socks5” in their config file. The issue being that newsboat won’t proxy DNS requests (thus will leak your requests).

To also proxy DNS requests over Tor, the proxy type socks5h has to be used (proxy-type socks5h) instead.

Ending notes:

I hope this blog post helps people stay more private from big-tech and ISP spying. Questions?, please email me (link in footer)

Published: 29th January 2023