Developer writes software for requesting sites via Tor in PHP – update

A software developer has put together an online service that allows websites to be visited over the Tor network. TORelay, as the software is called, is written in the php micro-framework Lumen. The software is released under the MIT license.

TORelay is a service that allows users to query web pages over the Tor network. Normally, separate software must be installed for this. Unlike the Tor software, TORelay does not seem to be able to access hidden Tor sites with the .onion extension. This is possible with the similar service Tor2Web. The source code of TORelay has been released under the MIT license and can now be found on Github, allowing anyone to install the software themselves.

TORelay was built by software developer Yada Khov, who writes on reddit that he set up the service in six hours as a weekend project. He was looking for a way to request data from APIs whose use is restricted via multiple IP addresses, in order to circumvent the limit. The software is written in the php micro-framework Lumen.

According to Khov, TORelay is especially useful for bypassing IP restrictions or firewalls. He warns that his service does not allow the same anonymity as the Tor software. The server on which TORelay runs sees the IP address of the users plus the requested websites. In principle, websites that are requested via the service cannot retrieve the IP address of users. Previously, TORelay also lacked https support, allowing requests to be intercepted en route to TORelay, but after criticism, Khov has since added it.

Update, 14.15: As stated in the comments, the developer just uses the socks5 proxy built into Tor.