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I intended to call this question: "Are SOCKS proxies still relevant?" but thought it would be too vague.

I know there are various SOCKS proxies that are actively maintained and developed (like Dante), but how are they useful in today's Internet landscape. I mean, there are Tor and alike for anonymity, and solutions like OpenVPN for virtual networking across firewall boundaries. So I'm interested in real-world SOCKS proxies usage examples. What is a good reason to prefer SOCKS to any of the variants above?

vsinitsyn
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SOCKS is useful when there may not be the facilities to use OpenVPN or the network overhead to leverage Tor.

Using a SOCKS proxy, one can tunnel other less secure protocols over a protocol like SSH and achieve a similar effect as a VPN. (although it incurs it's own special set of 'IP over IP' problems). Not every machine runs (or can run) a VPN end point, but just about every Linux machine runs sshd. :D

Additionally, a SOCKS proxy can be used to transparently redirect older applications ports to ports that the application may not have previously supported.

Justin Pearce
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