I sometimes route my Web traffic through ssh using a SOCKS proxy. The purpose is to have all traffic be encrypted.
The way I do it is to open up a terminal and run this...
$ ssh -v -C -N -D 9000 my_own_vps_host.com
And in local machine's network settings I check "SOCKS proxy" and set it to 127.0.0.1 port 9000.
My question is whether my local machine is sending plaintext URLs to the DNS server, or does it send those over the encrypted connection and let the remote server handle the DNS requests?
(My local machine is a Mac if that makes any difference.)