Glossary · Networking
DNS
The domain name system translates human-readable hostnames into IP addresses, and where that lookup happens can quietly expose your real location.
DNS is the internet's address book. Before your browser can reach a site by name it has to resolve that name to an IP address, and the domain name system is the distributed lookup that does it. It runs constantly and invisibly under everything you do online.
For proxy users the interesting question is where the lookup happens. If your traffic goes through a proxy but your DNS queries are resolved by your own local network, a site can learn your real location from the resolver even though your visible IP says otherwise. That mismatch is a classic leak.
A proxy setup that handles DNS remotely, resolving names at the exit rather than at your machine, closes that gap. SOCKS5's support for remote DNS is one of the concrete reasons it is preferred for anonymity-sensitive work.
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