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

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.

  • eroc1990@lemmy.parastor.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Otome-chan@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • nnullzz@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • BananaFlip@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Otome-chan@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • BananaFlip@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • BananaFlip@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • lemminer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Isn’t snowflake like bridges? I personally found bridges quite slower than connecting directly to the gaurd node.