for those who don’t know:
snowflake is a project by TOR that allows people to access censored services. Anyone can run a snowflake proxy. I’m using their firefox extension. more details here: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
0, since tor is blocked in my country. Thanks to everyone who’s running these btw, it’s really helpful
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Russia
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Yep
How’s the regular Internet there? The filtered one? Is it still usable, or are even normies looking for ways into the full Internet?
Any repercussions by doing this?
The snowflake proxy acts as a bridge to the tor network at the entry side. If by repercussions you mean risk of exit-node traffic, there are none. It might cost a little bit of bandwidth.
There’s the necessary info, thank you! - I’ve heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.
so. basically alternative tor entry points you can run in your browser for those who can’t connect directly to the tor network themselves?
Indeed. This works because direct connections to the tor network are easily censored, but WebRTC is not (not without a lot of collateral damage at least).
I’ve been doing it for quite a few months now, and I haven’t met any.
it’s basically a WebRTC connection between snowflake extension, and someone using tor. WebRTC is a common medium for peer-to-peer communication, so it can’t be blocked easily. Many popular services use WebRTC. e.g.: Matrix protocol, video conferencing services like jitisi meet, etc.
And here I thought Snowflake was just a slow but scalable database.
It’s also a data lake marketplace!
Today I Learned
Thanks! I’m now running a snowflake!
Mine is in docker. I don’t know if I can see the stats
You can, just have to pull the logs. If you use Portainer you can view them via the web interface under the container > logs.
thanks
I wasn’t aware my country had online censored services. Is there a way to see what Canada even has censored?
OONI Probe (it’s in the F-Droid “Guardian Project Official Releases” repository)
Is OONI probe really reliable? It’s saying that nothing’s blocked in my country even if we’re literally under authoritarian rule.
I didn’t know Firefox had a extension like that. I have Orbot set to when I’m on WiFi it opens a snowflake proxy. I have helped 29 people this week using orbot.
Rarely more than 3-4 per day nowadays, often not even 1. About a year ago it was easily in the double digits any given day.
I run multiple snowflakes in a docker container. They each have an average of 8 connections per hour
Good to know. I’m gonna host a standalone proxy
What’s the difference between this and a VPN? Aside from torrent sites what is actually censored?
This has nothing to do with torrents. Tor is a browser as well as a service of 3-chain proxies(triple vpn so that none of the three servers have all necessary information to find you or what you’re accessing. Snowflake proxy is run locally and acts somewhat like a proxy running in your device helping others to access internet via you to circumvent censorship which happens kn their region and not in your region
Thanks for telling me, I just installed it!
just spun it up on Docker, anyone know how to monitor its use?
Turns out its in the logs, whoohoo!
thanks for sharing mate, I’ll run it on server too!
18
First time hearing about this. Installed it on both my laptop and desktop. Helped 3 people so far :)
