How to Use Tor Snowflake Proxy

General Privacy & Security
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I learned about Tor Snowflake proxies today, and I am very interested in the project. Here is the project site for more info:

https://snowflake.torproject.org/

The site tells how to become a snowflake proxy and help others to defeat censorship, but not how to use a snowflake proxy to defeat censorship for oneself. Anyone know this or can figure it out better than I can?

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I looked a bit further, after being stumped. It looks like this is available in the alpha release of Tor, not the stable release. Looks like Tor has been working to move this into stable relatively recently:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40007

I found more details from the link to the documentation wiki, where it informs that

Snowflake is included in alpha releases of Tor Browser.

Sorry for the bother, hope someone else here finds this interesting :sweat_smile:

Edit: Here are some screenshots for using the Snowflake proxy feature in Tor. I am actually using it to submit this edit! :grinning:

First, select ā€œconfigureā€ when starting Tor for the first time:

Configure
Configure673Ɨ584 20.2 KB

Then, select ā€œsnowflakeā€ from the dropdown menu:

Select Snowflake
Select Snowflake673Ɨ591 19.6 KB

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so why the name ā€˜snowflakeā€™ ? arenā€™t you guys triggered by this ? :sweat_smile:

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From https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010310.html

Q: Why is it called Snowflake?
Thereā€™s a bunch of ā€œICEā€ negotiation happening for WebRTC, and it also
involves a great abundance of ephemeral and short-lived (and special!)
volunteer proxiesā€¦

ICE in this context refers to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Connectivity_Establishment (ICE), a technique for NAT traversal.

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to add further. because a snowflake is considered ephemeral and ICE is spelled like the word ā€˜Iceā€™ (frozen-water) then ICE + flake = snowflake ? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

imo, water is the farthest thing from ā€˜ephemeralā€™ (itā€™s been around at least as much as humanity has been around). itā€™s possible, however, depending how things pan out, that it will NOT survive us and neither will we without it ā€¦

interesting nonetheless ā€¦

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Starting today, snowflake proxy is available with the main release of Tor browser.

https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-105

Very cool technology for everyone who values the rights of privacy and anonymity.

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