Why YSK: Tor provides a secure, anonymous access to the web to people who can’t do it carelessly like we do (journalists and citizens of authoritarian countries for example).
Snowflake is a legal, zero effort way to help those people access the internet. If you’re interested in how it works, here’s the explaination I’m not including for the sake of brevity.
To actually use snowflake you just have to install the official browser extension
- for firefox
- for every other browser
- no safari afaik
That’s it, just make sure the extension is up and running and never worry about it again, it will do its thing and never bother you or even make you notice it’s there. It’s inexpensive in terms of resources too.
It’s the perfect way for me to be able to contribute to the Tor project without having to run a relay. Having Tor traffic running through my LAN has resulted in random sites blocking my network from accessing them, which over time just became a pain to deal with.
It is so satisfying to see the icon turn green or click on it and see that x number of people have used your snowflake.
this means a censored user is connecting through your extension to access the Internet!
what exactly is it doing? sounds like it turns your computer into a tor exit node? if so, that’s super dangerous.
No it looks like it creates a proxy that transforms the users internet traffic. The page also says this:
There is no need to worry about which websites people are accessing through your Snowflake proxy. Their visible browsing IP address will match their Tor exit node, not yours.
sounds like it turns your computer into a tor exit node?
Not at all. Snowflake belongs to the family of pluggable transports, and offers a connection to an entry node in the Tor Network. Just like a traditional bridge, with the advantage that the higher number of individual, constantly moving IP’s makes blocking them by oppressive regimes more difficult.
It uses WebRTC to disguise the traffic as a real time peer to peer communication, like video/voice call.
ah. so it’s using webrtc to function as a tor entry node. okay thank you. yes this is not something I’d want to install on my browser lol, but a lot safer than being an exit node.
Not quite. Snowflake, just like every other bridge, is one step before. Broadly speaking, blocked user connects to snowflake-proxy –> snowflake-proxy forwards blocked user’s traffic to an entry node. And that’s about it.
Thanks for bringing some attention to this.
To add to the OP, if on linux or macOS, you may want to consider running a standalone proxy. Contrary to the browser extension it allows more than one connection at the same time and is more beneficial to the tor network all around.
Setting up is more than trivial following the instructions linked above, meanwhile snowflake got packaged for Debian, Ubuntu and a few others as well.
For macOS users there’s is a homebrew package available.
Thank you for this
YSK about* haha
Oh thank you!
Isn’t snowflake like bridges? I personally found bridges quite slower than connecting directly to the gaurd node.
“To illustrate in the context of Tor, Snowflake allows anyone to leave a browser tab open to become an ephemeral Tor bridge. Much like the Flashproxy design, Snowflake involves a large network of highly ephemeral volunteer proxies, with the goal of outpacing the censor’s ability to block proxy IP addresses and providing a very easy to use, reliable, and hard-to-filter method of circumventing censorship.”
Is there any way to see stats on the command line based one?
