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.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
118 points (97.6% liked)
You Should Know
32998 readers
242 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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?