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.
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:
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.