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.
From https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/wikis/Technical Overview
“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.”