Hi, I like to piggy bag on this post on “Snowflake”
I am using for a while the add-on in FF browser and Tor-Browser and was wondering whether it was useful. I checked and saw an indicator that 8 connections were make throu this, so that sounds good and enough reason to continue using it.
Maybe should make a little more adverts for tor users to install this add-on and help other internet users.
I only wonder whether without a VPN and living in a country with a “stricked” internet law, I have any danger that authorities might come after me?
AFAIK there is no previous history of bridge operators (or middle relays for the case) being prosecuted for running a bridge. There is a history of governments (or other organizations) trying to block the access to tor, but not of prosecuting their users. If the government does care about stopping people from running proxies they can block the access to the broker or the bridge making the proxy completely useless, I would expect them to do that instead of trying to prosecute whoever runs proxies.
But assuming prosecution will happen. For an observer a snowflake proxy looks like a webrtc client, like any video-conference service. Just looking at the traffic is not going to be something remarkable or interesting to investigate. But is true, that if they are looking for snowflake proxies specifically they can look who is opening connections to the snowflake broker or the bridge and assume that those are proxies. So yes, if they are explicitly looking for snowflake proxies they could see that you are running one.
But as I say at the beginning there is no prior (known) cases of something like that happening, and I don’t think is not going to start now. But if you have some reason to believe the opposite maybe you should not run a snowflake proxy.
thanks a lot for the detailed explanation and assurance that (most likely) I will be safe. I will continue to use snowflake and will observe what happens, if anything.
In last 24 hrs , I have helped 1 user; that sounds very good to me.
