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I've gotten the sense that using TransPort as a transparent proxy is more-or-less deprecated, vs using application-specific SocksPort and, if necessary, torsocks. Is that correct?

If not, what are recommended use cases for TransPort?

What are the key considerations?

Also, I must say that Pluggable Transport and TransPort complicate searching.

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From my point-of-view, torsocks and using TransPort selectively for some applications (e.g. like Mike's suggested setup for Android) is quite equivalent.

Two key differences, though:

  • torsocks will take care of DNS leaks, so extra care is needed when using TransPort.
  • torsocks 2.0 will take care of filtering and blocking some network system calls. Again, it might be more straightforward than configuring the perfect firewall (hint: don't forget IPv6).

But in both cases, one can have a look at the application, what information it might be able to leak, and make an informed choice about routing its network traffic through Tor.

What is indeed now considered a bad idea is to route all traffic through Tor indiscriminately (using TransPort). Having some random update manager sends a unique hardware identifier through Tor might not be the best strategy for anonymity.

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